Beyond the Manosphere?
Redefining masculinity is a way of making men disappear
I haven’t watched Louis Theroux’s documentary on the “manosphere” and I don’t intend to. I’m familiar enough with the man’s oeuvre and with the kind of tricks he employs in service of an ostensible neutrality that’s anything but neutral. In the case of this new documentary, it’s obvious he chose the dumbest and most retarded people to interview precisely because he wanted the subject—broadly speaking: what’s ailing men in the modern world and what they’re trying to do about it—to appear as dumb and retarded as possible.
When you pick stupid, unlikeable people and point a camera at them, all you really have to do is stand back and let them be stupid and unlikeable. You can sort of splutter occasionally and look a bit bemused and not really say anything, which is exactly what Theroux does. The message—You should disapprove—comes across without an extra input or commentary.
It’s quite clever, and it works. Clearly. Theroux has followed this approach with pornstars and “white supremacist” Afrikaners and countless other undesirables, and now he’s doing it with Sneako and whoever the hell those other guys are.
Anyway, maybe once a week I buy a physical copy of The New York Times. This is a habit I’ve picked up over the last year from spending so much time in American airports and helping myself to free copies. There’s also something quite satisfying about reading the news in physical form, given how much time I spend in front of a bloody screen these days, and there’s got to be some benefit to reading the writing of people whose opinions differ radically from your own. I can bear Ross Douthat, but I still have trouble with Michelle Goldberg; although I’m building up a tolerance, slowly. It’s called hormesis, I’m told.
This week, I bought Tuesday’s edition. Making my way through it pretty quickly, as I always do, I came to the culture section at the back and a review of two new exhibitions in Amsterdam that “imagine the manosphere as a terrain to be redefined or expanded through a little creative ingenuity.”
“Beyond the Manosphere: Masculinities Today”—note the plural there—and “Am I Masculine?” are currently running at two museums in the city with unpronounceable, spittle-flecked names.
“Both shows arrive as the subject of masculinity is being reappraised with increased urgency,” The Times says.
“The idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ has gained traction over the past decade, and the discussion has also broadened to include a ‘masculinity crisis,’ in which some men feel unmoored from the attributes that were considered traditionally male.
“The manosphere, which emerged as an online subculture and has become a multimillion-dollar industry, was part of a larger call to action to revert to classical masculine values like physical Strength and economic self-reliance. Somehow, this translated into a summons to bulk up, start brawls and put women in their place.”
The first show features brightly coloured paintings of horses by an artist called Sands Murray-Wassink that signify the artist’s traumatic experience as a young boy who was told he couldn’t play with horses and unicorns; his grandfather, a stern Freudian psychoanalyst, eventually forced him to undergo conversion therapy to address his love of all things equine. There’s also a piece of performance art in which men confront each other with stereotypical masculine gestures—squaring up, puffing out their chests and the like.
The second show, “Am I Masculine?,” “largely focuses on male fashion and popular culture, with some contemporary art works.” The Times uses the word “deconstruct” to describe the curator’s preoccupations, which wouldn’t have been hard to guess, since that’s all the art world and the culture industry wants to do when it comes to identity—or at least the stable identifies that have sustained Western culture and civilisation and made them great.
“In the first room, there’s an emphasis on competition and power, with a kickboxing ring containing classical Greek and Roman sculpture replicas of Apollo and Hercules, videos of boxing and weight lifting competitions and clips of influencers such as Andrew Tate and the fitness guru Brian Pruett.
“As visitors move through the show, they see visual options for masculinity that become increasingly more gender fluid and eventually entirely free of constraints. The last room features mannequins dressed in a range of androgynous outfits—skirts and boxer shorts, high heels and blousy shirts—with images like a Dana Lixenberg portrait of the musician Prince and a photo of the Dutch gymnast Yuri van Gelder covered in glitter.”
There’s also a two-part exhibition called “Ocean Full of Tears,” that imagines “all the tears across the world that men cannot shed,” presumably because they’re too buttoned up and preoccupied with being manly.
None of this messaging is new. In fact, it’s exactly the same message we’ve heard for decades now. Men will be better off if they’re just, well, less like men. Even writers who take the so-called “crisis of masculinity” seriously, like Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men, make that argument too, by claiming the problem for young men today is that they’re not shown enough love and appreciation. Basically, young men need a pat on the back and some words of encouragement—they need to be welcomed into the world of self-esteem and care, which is the dominant, feminine, ethic today.
It hasn’t worked so far, and I don’t think it ever will. Then again, I don’t really think the aim is to solve the problem or “fix” masculinity. The aim is to define the problem out of existence, and with it men themselves.